October 28, 2003
(Storage Networking World)
Wayne Adams wears several hats: He is manager in the office of the CTO at EMC but is also deeply involved with technology development activities at SNIA, where he serves as a member of the board. In addition, he is a board member for the Storage Networking World Fall 2003 conference. He recently spoke with SNW Online executive editor Bruce Hoard about highlights of the upcoming Interoperability and Solutions Demo at the SNW conference in Orlando this week.
What are the goals of this conference's demo?
They are identical to those of the Spring SNW conference earlier this year. It's about demonstrating interoperable solutions that will address current-day problems in the data center, and it is based on shipping products. It's also about SNIA standards such as SMI-S and other SNIA technology initiatives.
We're talking about a big SAN here, right?
Just to give you an idea of the level of complexity, last spring, we created 26 distinct demonstrations inside of eight theme areas. So even though we can build a common infrastructure to serve some SAN work that's going on, from a storage standpoint, we're doing SAN and NAS. We're also showing point-to-point, long-haul interconnects to demonstrate disaster recovery. So it's not like one single demonstration by itself.
Will there be remote lines going off-site to do the backup demo?
Those backup demos will be done on-site. Nortel has a DWDM configuration, and Ciena has point-to-point over IP interconnect configurations. So attendees will see a backup solution that will go on over a SAN, over IP and over a long-distance interconnect technology over a number of vendor products, including Cisco, McData, Brocade and CNT.
Who will be on-site at the demo to answer questions?
There are going to be representatives from all the companies participating in the I/O lab, so that's 40 companies, and there will be SNIA staff people. All told, there is roughly going to be 100 people on-hand representing the different solutions that have been put together in the different places for the different theme areas. There will be another 25 distinct demonstrations. All representatives will be easily identified with colored shirts.
Can you give me an example of what some of these demos will be?
One of them will center on the current state of the marketplace for virtualization. Last spring, the Supported Solutions Forum put together a five-vendor switch fabric to demonstrate to the public. It showed that no matter what combination of switches you have inside your operation, you can put them together into a complete aggregated fabric. That fabric demonstrates to customers that they can preserve today's investments, and if they have technologies from multiple vendors, they can join them together to make a bigger, more comprehensive fabric. It also showed that if users are going to purchase new equipment, they don't have to feel locked into their current installed technology, and they can have flexibility of choice.
That work has been continued forward, and a virtualization demonstration has been layered on top of it to show the various methods of in-band and out-of-band virtualization from several different companies like IBM, Veritas, Datacore and Fujitsu Softech. This demo will show how you aggregate storage pools together from different vendors' storage arrays into a common pool and how you can do volume allocation and provisioning.
The virtualization techniques are going to be distinct by themselves because each approach to virtualization is unique. This is not designed to be a common infrastructure where you end up having different vendor implementations that are plug-and-play. The main charter of the Supported Solutions Forum within SNIA is to build deployable, multi-vendor blueprint solutions that are supported by a third-party broker.
How will SMIS fit in?
The SMIS-S demonstration will include 20 vendors with over 30 products that have been put together for representing storage management applications, which from the SMI-S standpoint are called SMI-S clients. There will also be switches, storage arrays and NAS filers, and they are referred to as SMI-S providers. In this environment, the clients are gathering data from the providers and driving their storage management applications using a standard interface, called SMIS. And what attendees will see from the clients is the ability to talk to 15 or so hardware platforms representing switches, storage arrays and NAS filers.
We're looking for SMIS to be ratified during the second quarter of 2004. All the plug-festing activities that bring together the SMIS implementations have been referred to as CIM-SAN, but this has been re-labeled as SMI-Lab. This was done to go outside of the SAN itself and to include iSCSI and IP networking that is associated with NAS devices.
There is a plug-fest that has been going on since August and will end in December. This is a snapshot in time of the data from that plug-fest, and it will be transported into SNW.
Tell me a little bit more about how iSCSI technology will be on display.
There's going to be a dedicated theme area entitled, "Delivering storage solutions over IP networks." What you will see is a number of storage arrays with native iSCSI channel directors on the front end and bridges where they need SCSI or Fibre Channel going to a bridge and going into iSCSI. And then on the host side, you will see native host bus adapters for porting the iSCSI protocol.
There will also be solutions that deal with backup over iSCSI for things like database access and e-mail — basically, all the commercial applications that run on a SAN will be shown running over iSCSI. The major message here is that iSCSI is available in commercial products, it is interoperable, and if it is what you need for your operations, you can work with the vendors here and try to put together solutions.
What realistic benefits can attendees expect to gain from the demo?
That's an interesting question. Last spring, I put together a comprehensive survey for attendees, and 90 people filled in the survey, which had a couple of open-ended questions asking what they gained from the demo.
I had about five pages of write-ins from these 90 people, and it spans everything from, "I get to speak to the experts that know how the technology works, and I can get my problems solved," to, "I'm looking for a solution just like the one I see here, and it's good to know that it's working with the vendors I have in mind." So we've seen everything from, "I have it already — help me maximize it and optimize it," to, "I'm looking for my next solution. Who can I talk to to get the ins and outs and cautions and caveats?"
By the same token, what kind of feedback do the vendors receive from dealing with users at the demo? What lessons do the vendors learn?
One of the first things happens before the customers even walk in. The engineers find that even though they are standing shoulder to shoulder with competitors, they can still collaborate to build a solution that is really addressing what end-user customers are looking for. From the customer standpoint, they get a lot of qualitative feedback. I won't say quantitative because it's based on how many conversations one engineer or company representative can have with the attendees.
Also, because engineers are sometimes not dealing directly with customers, they have dependencies on their product management and product marketing organizations to gather requirements. So, for the engineer to hear those requirements first-hand from customers helps clarify in their mind that something is real as opposed to being an item on some business manager's wish list.